The Indian didn’t go toward the fort or join up with any of the groups of Indians they met on the trail through the woods. Sometimes the Indian would stop to talk while the other Indians fastened their eyes on Brice and fingered their tomahawks. They wanted to kill him, but the man who’d taken him captive always shook his head as he pointed to first Brice and then himself.
Brice half-closed his eyes and pretended to be too near exhaustion to even care what his fate might be, but he grabbed on to every word he knew and turned the unfamiliar words over in his mind to try to understand what the warriors were saying. The other Indians called his captor Lone Hawk. That seemed to fit the man since, even while his friends were there beside him on the trail, his eyes were looking beyond to the woods.
When they moved away from the trail deeper into the forest, the only sounds between them were their grunting breaths as they pushed their way through the ever-deepening snow. Near the end of the first day, the Indian pulled a coat and a pair of moccasins from the plunder and shoved them at Brice. Without a word, Brice put down his load to put on the coat. When he leaned over to put on the moccasins, blood was soaking through the blanket strips he’d wrapped around his feet after an Indian had taken his shoes during the massacre.
But he had no time to worry about his feet now. He shoved the moccasins on over the blanket wrappings. When he was free again, he’d tend to them. First he had to be free.
By the end of the second day they were completely alone in the wilderness. No more Indians passed their way, and they saw no signs of camps. Lone Hawk was moving west as if guided by an inner sense of urgency. Brice followed without speaking and did his best to keep his mind trained on the direction they were moving even when the clouds and trees hid the sun and stars.
When they made camp the second night, Brice gathered wood and made the fire the way the Indians had taught him so many years ago. He cooked the rabbit the Indian had shot with his bow earlier in the day, and cleared away the snow and gathered branches for their beds.
“You make good Indian.” Lone Hawk spoke the first words between them since they’d left Frenchtown. Then he added as though Brice would be glad to hear the words, “You prove brave, my tribe adopt you. You won’t have to be slave.”
Brice raised his eyes to stare across the fire at him. Just three days ago, this man and his kind had gone through Frenchtown, striking down helpless men without mercy. As Brice thought of the wounded men struggling to the doors of the burning houses only to be struck down by the tomahawk of a waiting Indian, it was all he could do to stay crouched there and not spring across the fire at the Indian.
The Indian smiled slowly. “You have much anger.”
Brice didn’t lower his eyes. “Much.”
“White man worry too much about the dead. Dead are dead.”
“Does the red man forget his dead?” It had been so long since Brice had spoken that his voice sounded strange to his ears.
“Red man, white man not the same.” The Indian narrowed his eyes and stared at Brice. “You be red man, you might live. Be white man, you die.”
Brice just stared back at him without speaking.
After a long moment, the Indian pointed at one of the piles of branches. “Sleep.”
Brice obediently lay down. Lone Hawk settled on his own bed. He kept his hand closed around the handle of his tomahawk. Brice closed his eyes and breathed in and out slowly and evenly.
He had the feeling they would reach Lone Hawk’s village the next day. Then the odds would be against his ever making it out of the woods alive. Brice didn’t doubt the Indian meant to give him a chance to live, but it wasn’t easy for a white man to prove worthy of becoming a red man. There would be gauntlets to run and other tests of his endurance and bravery.
Brice opened his eyes a slit. The Indian was just a fuzzy shape in the flickering firelight. The man might be asleep, but Brice thought he was too still, like a cat tensed ready to spring on a bird. Brice sat up to test him. Slowly he leaned over to place another piece of wood on the fire. Lone Hawk’s hand tightened around the tomahawk as he raised it a bit off the ground.
Brice settled back down on the branches. He was in no hurry, but before the sun came up he or the Indian would be dead.
While the night deepened, Brice thought of Kerns and how the boy had looked death right in the eye and reached for his Lord’s hand to lead him across the divide. Brice stared up toward treetops so thick he couldn’t spot a single star. He wished he’d asked Seth more about praying, because there in the deep of the night as he waited and the screams of the wounded men burning in the houses echoed in his mind, he felt the need for prayer.
He tried saying prayer words in his mind, but they just circled in his head and found no wings. Perhaps he was praying for the wrong thing. As Lone Hawk had said, the dead were dead. Nothing he or prayer could do to change that. He could pray for the prisoners who had been marched away. He even thought a prayer for Hope even though he figured the old woodsman had probably already found some way to slip away from the British. Hope had chafed even under the rules of the militia. He’d make a poor prisoner.
It was hard for Brice to think of Gabrielle as Hope’s child. Hope was a wild thing ruled by the woods and his desires. Then Brice remembered Gabrielle’s eyes and the deep well of trusting innocence there that only the very young ever have. That kind of innocence should have been destroyed long before she even joined the Shakers.
So perhaps she was more like a wild thing than he’d thought. A wild thing born without a fear of the world, but with a special trust in the goodness of all things and all people. At least until he’d brought the doubts of the world to her. Had it been right for him to disturb her innocence? The old sister had thought not. In her eyes, Brice had brought discord and evil into the Shaker village.
But Brice had no wish to ever do anything to harm Gabrielle. He loved her. Even here lost in this wilderness, his love for her sprang up fresh and strong inside him like an ever-flowing spring. She was life to him.
He whispered the words in his head and Gabrielle was there in his mind as she’d been the last time he’d seen her. He’d felt like an intruder as he watched her come to her private place to pray. She was afraid when he stopped her. Not of him but of the feelings within herself. Then when he put his arms around her, she yielded so sweetly, lifting her lips up to meet his.
She loved him. She admitted it. Yet her words had been sure and determined when she sent him away, but Brice couldn’t accept those words as final. He would make her send him away again and again if he lived to return to Kentucky. She didn’t belong with the Shakers. She belonged with him.
It had been months since he’d seen her, but her image hadn’t faded in his mind. He could call her forth and she became almost real before his eyes. This night as he lay in the darkness she felt even closer to him than usual.
What was it Nathan had said the day of the massacre? “She’s praying for us. I always knew when she prayed for me.”
And Brice understood now what he meant. He felt her prayers for him reaching out to the Lord when he could find no words to pray himself.
Poor Nathan. Her prayers hadn’t saved him. Brice looked out of the corner of his eye toward Lone Hawk. He could only hope Gabrielle’s prayers would do him more good.
The Indian wasn’t asleep. He was waiting just as Brice was for the moment to come between them. Brice wondered if he too was praying or if he was simply lying there anticipating burying his tomahawk in Brice’s head as further proof of his bravery.
Brice shut away all thoughts of Gabrielle as he practiced in his mind what he was going to do in the next few minutes just as he did before he made the first cut with his lancet. When he had the first move clear in his mind, he even pushed that aside. In order to survive, he had to be ready to react instinctively to whatever happened.
Then it was time. The moment was no different from the last, but Brice knew the time had come.
He sprang across the dying embers of the fire and landed on top of the Indian. Lone Hawk was ready. Brice twisted to the left and the Indian’s tomahawk bit deeply into Brice’s shoulder. The Indian tried to pull it back to strike again, but Brice knocked his arm down against a branch. The tomahawk slid out of the Indian’s hand and disappeared in the snow.
Brice’s blood splattered down on Lone Hawk as they grappled in the dark. They were closely matched in strength, and if Brice had given in to the pain of his shoulder, Lone Hawk would have won easily. Instead Brice fought as if he were whole. Their breaths came in grunts and gasps as they rolled about in the snow with first one and then the other taking the advantage.
Then the Indian had his knife out of his belt, and Brice felt the point of the blade on the skin of his neck. He shifted away from it and threw his body against Lone Hawk’s arm. Brice’s sudden movement to the side caught the Indian by surprise when he thought he’d already won the battle. Brice came down hard on Lone Hawk’s arm and drove the knife into the Indian’s chest.
Lone Hawk made one last effort to shove Brice off of him, but the knife had gone deep. He fell limply back on the snow.
Brice kept his grip on the Indian as strong as ever until he was sure Lone Hawk was playing no tricks. Then Brice sat back on his heels and drew in a long breath. Finally he took hold of the hilt of the knife and pulled it out of the Indian’s chest with one clean jerk. He wiped the blood off in the snow and stuck the knife in his belt before he put his ear close to the Indian’s mouth and then to his chest. The man was breathing shallowly, but his heartbeat was strong. He had a chance of surviving the wound.
Surviving to kill more. Brice took the knife back out of his belt and held it above the Indian’s heart. Then slowly Brice put the knife back in his belt. He tore strips off a blanket and quickly tied Lone Hawk’s hands and feet. The man was surely too severely wounded to lunge at Brice, but if Lone Hawk regained consciousness, Brice had no doubt he would try.
Brice built up the fire. Then in the flickering light of the flames, he pulled his shirt back and probed his own wound with his fingers. It was to the bone. The shock and the cold kept the pain at bay, but blood was streaming down his chest. Already he felt a little lightheaded. He almost smiled thinking that if he had a fever he’d surely survive with all the impurities in his blood leaving his body so freely.
All traces of a smile faded away. If he had any chance of walking out of this wilderness, he’d have to stop the bleeding. He wished for his bag of medicines, but they hadn’t been part of Lone Hawk’s plunder. Awkwardly with one hand, Brice bound up the wound as tightly as possible. At first light he’d search the woods for the right kind of bark to make a poultice.
With his good arm, he pulled Lone Hawk back up on the branch bed. The Indian’s wound was seeping blood. Brice wrapped a strip of blanket around the Indian’s chest and tied it tightly. Then he covered him with one of the coats before he went through the Indian’s plunder from Frenchtown. He laid aside a portion of the Indian’s corn and tucked the pouch holding the rest of it inside his shirt.
Brice took the Indian’s tomahawk and gun to his side of the fire and put them under his blanket. He didn’t lie down to sleep but sat up and fed the fire to keep away the cold while he waited for first light.
Dawn was just sneaking fingers of gray light in under the trees when Brice left the Indian to find wood and something to treat his wound. The sun was up when he came back into camp warily, but Lone Hawk didn’t rouse. Brice built up the fire and melted snow in the pot before adding the bits of bark and the one chip of root he’d been able to dig out of the frozen, snow-covered ground.
While he stirred the mixture, he felt the Indian’s eyes on him, but he didn’t look up at him. When the bitter brew was hot, Brice poured some into a cup and faced the Indian. The bindings on his hands and feet were tight and secure. He approached him carefully and offered him the drink.
Lone Hawk raised his head and let Brice pour the hot liquid into his mouth. Brice backed away and drank the rest himself. Lone Hawk lay back and stared at Brice with narrowed eyes. “White man not brave enough to kill Lone Hawk. White man coward.”
“Our fight is done, Lone Hawk. There’s no reason to kill you now. I’m leaving.”
“Lone Hawk follow.”
“No. You’ll need to get to your village while you have the strength.”
“Lone Hawk send red brothers after you.”
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take.” Brice piled more wood on the fire and picked up his pack. “I’ll leave the brew for you.” Brice pulled out the Indian’s knife and with a quick motion cut through the strips that bound the Indian’s hands.
“No need white man’s medicine.” Lone Hawk started to push himself up off the ground.
“Stay there. I could still kill you.”
The Indian made a sound of contempt. “White man got no stomach for killing.” But he stayed where he was.
“I’ll kill you if I have to,” Brice said softly, not taking his eyes off the Indian.
“You take gun and knife and tomahawk. White man let bear and wolf kill for him.”
Brice didn’t say anything as he backed slowly away from Lone Hawk until he was sure the man wasn’t going to try to lunge across the fire after him. Then he turned and trotted away from their camp. Just before he got out of sight, Brice turned back and with his good arm he threw the tomahawk into a tree some distance from where Lone Hawk lay.
“Lone Hawk not forget,” the Indian called after him.
But Brice wasn’t sure what it was Lone Hawk wouldn’t forget. The tomahawk or the promise to come after Brice. Brice left the camp behind in a few steps. He couldn’t worry about Lone Hawk. He had to stay on his feet and find the way out of this snowy wilderness without stumbling across any other Indian warriors.
By the middle of the day, the pain in his shoulder raged through his whole body until everything around him seemed unreal. All he knew was the pain. He struggled to keep enough of his wits about him to stay moving to the south. Always to the south, but sometimes he came to himself and realized he’d walked a circle. Each time he shook his head to clear his thinking, faced south, and kept moving. He had to keep moving or die.
At the end of the second day or what Brice thought was the second day, darkness caught him unprepared. He hadn’t scouted out a good spot to make camp or even gathered any wood for a fire. Brice sank down in the snow and leaned back against a tree. He ordered himself to get up and cut pine limbs for a bed, but his body didn’t respond.
It was so cold and so dark. Not just in the woods around him but inside him too. The pain from his shoulder penetrated every inch of his body and used up his last bit of strength. Brice wondered if Lone Hawk had made it to his village or if he too was sitting in the dark waiting for death.
Brice had seen many people die. Too many. But he’d never thought about his own breath stopping. A sharp sorrow pierced his heart as he thought about never seeing Gabrielle again. Was she praying for him now? Did she really love him or had he only imagined that? He wanted to call up her image, to have her there in his mind while he was breathing his last, but he could not. She was just a shadowy image far from him, away through the trees. It didn’t seem right that she wouldn’t come close to him in his dying moments.
He shut his eyes, but then pushed them back open. If he went to sleep, he’d surely freeze. Then he wasn’t sure whether he was asleep or awake as he stared out through the trees to see another shadow drift up beside Gabrielle. Hallucinations. He’d known many patients to have them when death lingered around them.
He shook his head and Gabrielle disappeared, but the other shadow stayed and came closer. Brice leaned forward. It was Bates or maybe Kerns and he was beckoning to him. But they were both dead. His mind was still clear enough to remember that. Maybe that was it. One of them had come to guide him over to the land of the dead with them.
Brice rose to follow the boy. Bates, he thought one minute, and Kerns, the next. He wasn’t sure if his whole body followed or if only his spirit struggled up off the ground. But when he looked over his shoulder, there was nothing by the tree and the pain stayed with him. If he had died, wouldn’t the pain be gone?
He followed the shadow in front of him. It seemed important to catch up with Nathan. He was pretty sure it was Nathan this time. He tried to walk faster and ran into a limb. The shadow stopped and waited until Brice started walking again before it drifted on ahead of him.
All at once the shadowy figure of the boy was gone. Brice stood very still and searched for some sight of the boy, but there was nothing but trees and snow. But not as many trees. Moonlight drifted down into the woods and pushed back the darkness. It was a moment before Brice realized what the bulky dark shape in front of him was. Even after he recognized the outline of a cabin, he wondered if it too was a hallucination like the boy. Any second he’d awaken and be leaning against the tree in the woods waiting for death’s dark horse to come for him.
Until then he’d stay in the dream. He climbed the steps and pushed open the cabin door. The cabin smelled of wild animals. Brice’s toe hit something soft in the darkness and the musty odor of pine needles rose up to his nose. He eased himself down on the bed. Just before he lost consciousness, he wondered if he’d wake up in paradise.
Mice running across his feet woke him the next morning. Slowly Brice pulled himself up to a sitting position, and the mice scattered and disappeared through the holes in the chinks of the logs. He was in a cabin, so what had happened the night before hadn’t been all a hallucination. The cabin was real.
The cabin showed no sign that anybody had been there for a good while, maybe even before winter set in. Dirt lay thick in the cabin, and vines, now dead and frozen, had crept into the cabin from the outside to grow over a stack of wood by the fireplace. A small sack hung from one of the rafters in the middle of the room.
Brice stood up, took down the sack, and opened it. Then just to prove to himself it was real, he stuck his hand into the ground corn and let it fall off his fingers. No man would go off and leave a sack of corn meal. Not unless he died.
Brice put the sack on the floor and built a fire. Whatever had happened to the other man didn’t matter now. Brice had been given a chance to live. It didn’t even matter if his dream last night had been real or if he’d just stumbled on the cabin by blind luck. He was here. He had a sack of meal, and he was going to live.
He melted snow and made a thin gruel in the dusty pot that hung beside the fireplace. He ate slowly and let his body draw strength from the warmth of the food. Then he pulled the bandage away from his wound. It was bad. He’d cut off men’s arms with wounds no worse.
He looked at it a long time before he laid the blade of Lone Hawk’s scalping knife in the fire. He hung the sack of meal back up before going outside to break up some limbs for the fire and bring in more snow for the pot. Once he was ready, he barred the door. Then he sat down in front of the fire and waited.
When the knife blade was white hot, he carefully picked the knife out of the coals with his good hand and lay down on the floor. With no hesitation, he placed the flat side of the blade on his wound and held it there until everything went black.